Sky City's 220 Stories Are Go

The Sky City skyscraper will begin construction in Changsha in Hunan province, China by June of this year. In the one building, there will be accommodation for 4,450 families in apartments ranging from 645 square feet to 5,000 square feet. There will also be 250 hotel rooms, 100,000 square feet of school, hospital and office space. The building will contain over eleven million square feet. Note that the footprint of the building is only ten percent of the site; the rest is open parkland.

Take a look at this brief descriptive video.

(Sky City, 220 stories surrounded by parkland)

The building is designed to be earthquake resistant to Magnitude 9, and to a 3 hour fire resistance rating, provided by ceramics installed around the structure. 16,000 part time and 3,000 full time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months. The Broad system is based on prefabricated floor panels that ship with everything need to go 3D packed along with it, so they are not shipping a lot of air. It all just bolts together. BSC claims that by building this way, they eliminate construction waste, lost time managing trades, keep tight cost control and can build at a cost 50% to 60% less than conventional construction.

The building is to cost $628 million and have 11 million square feet of space inside, which is about $60 per square foot. A 1000 square foot apartment would cost the developer about $60,000 and might sell for about $100,000.

This incredible structure, which is a bit taller than the Burj in Dubai, is a very close match for the arcology presented by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in their 1981 novel Oath of Fealty.

The building was a thousand feet in height rising starkly from a square base two miles on a side. It rested among green parklands and orange groves and low concrete structures so that it stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors. The sheer bulk dwarfed everything in view.
(Read more about the Todos Santos Independency)

Pournelle and Niven point out (as I recall) all of the benefits of this type of building in the course of the novel.

Both the real building and the fictional one owe a lot to the work of visionary designer and builder Paolo Soleri, the creator of the Arcosanti project.